SIGNS OF THE TIMES IN JAPAN.
The singular and repeated earthquakes in Japan, for instance, fill us with a certain strange awe. Mr. Shue W. Kuroda writes of the late earthquake and tidal wave that so desolated and devastated the northeast as an event surpassing for its terrors any known to Japanese history. On June 15 the sea began to swell and inundated 125 miles of coast-line, 2 miles broad, and to an average depth of 100 feet.9Thousands of inhabitants in a hundred towns were in five minutes swept away. In one town of 6,000 only 4 survive; 40,000 corpses were found on the shore in a few days, dismembered bodies found among the floating débris of houses, and in places thousands more found, after the subsidence, piled up in heaps. The total loss of life is reckoned at 60,000. A war such as was waged with China could have been carried on for half a century and not sacrifice more lives; and even this is but a fraction of the misery wrought, for thousands who survive are wounded, crippled, penniless, and homeless. There is a religious declension in Japan, which to some of us is more melancholy than the earthquakes. For instance, the Doshisha University, founded by Joseph Neesima, with the aid of the American Board of Foreign Missions, ends the dispute between it and the board by declaring itself independent, the native trustees assuming complete control of the institution. This they legally justify by the fact that, by Japanese law, natives alone can hold real estate, and the foreign missionaries were therefore obliged to select such to represent them. Some such claim of real control was certain to arise sooner or later, but it is melancholy that it should have taken place with so much friction, and still worse that it should have resulted from and exhibit a decided reaction in this institution against evangelical Christianity. The trustees profess their intention to maintain its Christian character, but whether there is sincerity, or, if sincerity, ability to carry out such intention, is doubtful. Nothing but a decided impulse from the Spirit of God, quickening the native churches and pastors, can, in our judgment, save Japanese Christianity from disaster.—Missionary Review.